Tag Archives: interviews

Connect@Wes is a networking “practice” event for Wesleyan students of all class years and interests. The event will be set up in a speed networking format with students rotating through short sessions with different mentors to perfect their version of, “Tell me about yourself”.

Wesleyan alumni, and recruiters from employer partners use their experience and expertise to critique student “presentations” and give valuable insight on how their presentation might be stronger or more effective. This format allows Wesleyan students to build confidence while preparing to be a professional in the future. A reception will follow in Beckham for all participants.

REGISTRATION INFORMATION:
If you’d like to participate in the event you must REGISTER on CareerDrive with an approved resume by MARCH 1st. Click HERE to register. Space is limited so register as soon as possible. By registering you are automatically accepted into the program.

If you have questions, please contact Anne Holstead Santaniello in the Career Center at 860-685- -978 or by emailing asantaniello[at]wesleyan[dot]edu

It’s October, which means that you’ve settled into classes, Fall Break is only weeks away, and it’s probably the only month of the semester that you won’t receive emails from PTURENNE.

Email from PTURENNE usually include words such as “pre-registration,” “drop/add,” and “adjustment period,” and come in spurts over the course of a week or two. When you see PTURENNE in your inbox, it typically means that it’s about time that you start planning for the next semester. When you hear about PTURENNE sightings and do not in fact see the emails yourself, it means that you are graduating and will soon have to grapple with the mythical place known as “the real world” (or, alternatively, the fall-back plan known as “Brooklyn”).

On a scale of "PTURENNE" to "JKUBAT," how many emails a day do you get at your new job?

Believe it or not, PTURENNE is actually a real person. His name is Paul Turenne, and he is an Associate Registrar at Wesleyan. I interviewed Paul about his job, being a mysterious automated email presence, and what he does when he’s not on campus.

What are your duties as Associate Registrar?

I manage the academic electronic portfolios. More specifically, I manage processes like course registration, major declaration, grade entry, and some technical stuff with teaching evaluations. I started in this position in August 2007.

Our second (and maybe final) presidential interview is with William Chace, president from 1988 to 1994.

William Chace was only president of Wesleyan for six years, but between firebombings, racially charged graffiti, student occupations, and hunger strikes, he probably dealt with enough strife and campus unrest to fill two decades of Wes history. Twenty years later, Chace, a literature scholar and former Stanford administrator, still wrestles with his Wesleyan experience. “Those were the hardest years of my life,” President Chace told Wesleying. “It was a tough place for me.”

“Perhaps some of the problems were of my own making,” he conceded, “but I didn’t bomb my own office.”

Back in the fall, we contacted President Chace, who left the presidency of Emory University in 2003 and now lives in California, for an interview. “Well, of course,” Chace soon replied. “But please keep in mind that I left Wesleyan in 1994, some 18 years ago, and I do not have with me records of the time. So it will be memory, all memory, a facility at once pregnant with apparent certitude and often quite erroneous.”

At 35, Colin Campbell was the youngest president in Wesleyan’s history, and after 18 years at the helm, he became one of its longest-serving leaders. Though he wasn’t a Wesleyan alum and has never earned a Ph.D., President Campbell succesfully presided over some of the most immense change in the University’s history, from coeducation to the construction of the Center for the Arts and the Williams Street apartments. Beloved by a wide range of alumni and faculty, Campbell got to hang out with everyone from Joss Whedon ’87and Michael Bay ’86 to Bill Belichick ’75in the process. He left academia in 1988, but if you try to schedule a phone interview with him today you’ll learn that Campbell is Wesleyan’s busiest former president: he serves as president of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which is funny considering a lot of Wesleyan alums end up in Williamsburg, but usually not that Williamsburg.

Back in the fall, Wesleying rather ambitiously set out to catch up with each of the three survivingformeroccupants of South College and give them a chance to reflect on their time in office. We weren’t entirely successful (we couldn’t get President Bennet’59 to reply to our emails), but President Campbell enthusiastically replied within the hour to express his delight at the idea. pyrotechnicsand I called him up one morning in February and chatted about everything from South African divestment to Das Racist to the time he nearly got pied in the face. Oh, and he also told us about the time a young Michael S. Roth ’78 occupied his office in protest in the 1970s. We found President Campbell to be a remarkably friendly dude. Read on for the interview.

“What we were doing at Wesleyan was taking place in the context of a much larger sweep of change in American history and culture.”

Sheila Tobias with NOW Founder Betty Friedan in the 1970s while Tobias was Associate Provost for Coeducation at Wesleyan. Image courtesy of Ms. Tobias.

In September of 1970, the same month Colin Campbell became Wesleyan’s youngest ever president, Sheila Tobias arrived at Wesleyan as associate provost. A noted author, scholar, and feminist activist, Tobias’ task at Wesleyan was different than that of any previous administrator—and different than any provost since then. Wesleyan had only just begun admitting women, and for the next eight years, Tobias was to oversee the inclusion of women in student life and assist the University in hiring and retaining female faculty. She was also instrumental in bringing the first women’s studies courses to Wes.

“It wasn’t a party school, but it was a school that catered to young men in all their glory,” Tobias says of the Wesleyan of the 1960s. “That was the place that I was invited to help change.”

While Tobias says that Wesleyan transitioned into coeducation more swiftly than many of its peers (“Wesleyan did it right”), she insists that the changes on campus were part of a much larger movement. “What we were doing at Wesleyan—namely, integrating a formerly men’s college—was taking place in the context of a much larger sweep of change in American history and culture,” Tobias says.

Wesleying is psyched to present an interview with Sheila Tobias, whose published books include Overcoming Math Anxiety, They’re not Dumb, They’re Different, Breaking the Science Barrier, Rethinking Science as a Career, and Faces of Feminism: An Activist’s Reflections on the Women’s Movement. For more on Sheila Tobias and her career at Wesleyan, see her website or this Special Collections blog post by Cordelia Hyland ’13.

In order to prepare the student body for Wesleyan’s annual concert in the hockey rinkno on Foss Hill whoops back in the hockey rink, we set up an interview with Luke Silas, drummer for chip-tune indie-rock band Anamanaguchi. Since forming in 2004, the band has been featured in Rock Band and have written and performed the music for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game. They even played Zonker HarrisZe Who Must Not Be Named Day in 2010. Luke writes in from Norway, where Anamanaguchi was performing before coming to Wes tomorrow.

Wesleying: I have an NES and an old Gameboy in my room right now, so when I first heard your stuff, I freaked out a little bit when I recognized old sounds from something like a Ducktales NES game. What inspired you to produce this style of music?

The answer is so obvious you may not have realized it: WesFest began on a Wednesday rather than a Thursday this year and, as per the official schedule, it’s now over. But the weekend is only getting started! What gives?

The issue first came to my attention way back in November, when the Office of Admissions tried pushing WesFest to a Mon-Tues-Wed format and some WSA members registered their discontent. Noticing that 4/20 falls this year on the third Saturday of April (traditionally the last day of WesFest), the reasoning seemed pretty obvious:

News flash: Wesleyan is changing wesfest to Mon-Weds to avoid having it on 4/20. Fuck that. Smoke weed everyday.

As Dean Culliton reminded us yesterday, it’s no secret that the powers that be are a little squeamish about traditional 4/20 proceedings. Add prefrosh to the mix, and it’s an entirely new crisis. This story is well recounted in Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers, when a student is waitlisted after writing her college essay about getting caught with a weed brownie in high school; she subsequently visits Wesleyan on April 20, 2000, and feels stung by the hypocrisy of it all. The most recent time WesFest fell on 4/20 was 2008, when Director of ResLife Fran Koerting was quoted in the Argus as saying that Admissions would not let the two holidays overlap again. Apparently the problem was that if students were smoking marijuana on Foss Hill, prefrosh might think that “anything goes on here”:

Okay. We get it. You’re tired of us showing you how THESISCRAZED everyone is. Want to see some happy motherfuckers? Come to the Olin steps today at 4pm.

P.S. Looking for a way to procrastinate your paper? Check out our other installments of 2013 THESISCRAZY here, here, here, and here. Also, ever wondered how many people are getting it on in their carrels? Now you are.

Read after the jump to see the last group of nuts thesis people (#thesiswhy).

It’s that time of year when seniors begin to pull their hair out (literally), sleep under their desks, and string together crazy amounts of run-on sentences that make English teachers everywhere shudder.

Welcome to THESISCRAZY, the feature where we, the fearless writers of Wesleying, maneuver our way into the corners of campus where thesis writers work live and hit them with rapid-fire questions about their theses.

It’s pretty much what you thought would happen: once you left Middletown for spring break, things got interesting. The ongoing saga over the proposed Washington Street commercial development entered a new phase of visibility when community activists, parents, children, professors, and students took to Wash and High St. for an hour yesterday afternoon, cycling around the intersection to present their opposition to the potential development to motorists.

Wesleyan’s institutional involvement in the decision opened with a proposal to move Broad Street Books to the new complex, if built. Though the bookstore plans were quickly canceled due to a chilly reception from the Wes community and Middletown, the administration is still contracted to sell its property in the area to the developer, Centerplan.

Below, see some interviews featuring Jen from Kid City ’88 (hello!) and Maggie Masselli ’16 (hi!), as well as footage of walk-signal coordinated crossings. More information after the jump; comments, corrections, and points of information welcomed.